Mandy (2018)

For those who think nothing of staying up past midnight to devour the strange and fantastic, it hits the sweetest of spots.

If revenge films are a dime a dozen, then Mandy cost a bunch of dimes. The plot is straightforward but visually, aurally, symbolically, it's a heavy motion picture that may be too much for some audiences to handle.

Displays some decent visual gimmickry but shoots for mystical and epic but ultimately feels laboured and pointless.

This film is a fusion of kitsch and pulp, underscored with a genuine spiritual yearning.

It's the kind of extreme moviegoing experience made for midnight-movie cult worship.

The film is about nothing-aside, of course, from the sight of a blood-spattered Nicolas Cage gritting his teeth as he rams the sharpened knob of his ax down someone's throat.

Mandy herself is half oneiric goddess, half vulnerable loner, and Riseborough possesses a fascinating spookiness that makes you forget she's a cliché.

Walks a fine line between the cool and the ridiculous, and then finally erases the line.

...an art-house exercise in often infuriating self-indulgence.

Mandy is an instant cult classic. ... This is a rock opera as envisioned by the lords of hell.

Even with the radical shift between its two halves, the film presents a cohesive vision, if only on account of how utterly strange it is.

The most disturbing part is that Mandy is alluring regardless. Every frame of its picture and every note of its score bleeds anger or sorrow, but even when it simmers with these ostensibly negative, destructive emotions, it does so melodiously.